In a virtualized computer system, a lock may be used to ensure that only one virtual central processing unit (vCPU) can access a critical resource, such as a memory, at a time. A spinlock in the virtualized computer system is a lock that can cause a vCPU trying to acquire the resource to wait in a loop (“spin”) while repeatedly checking if the lock is available. In a non-virtualized system, a spinlock may generally be resolved quickly because in most instances the lock can be released after a short time period. However, a virtualized computing system can suffer severe performance degradation as a result of spinlock operations because a virtual CPU that holds a lock may be de-scheduled from execution for a long period of time.